At the level of political policy, ethnic relations is discussed in terms of either assimilationism or multiculturalism. Anti-racism forms another style of policy, particularly popular in the 1960s and 1970s. At the level of academic inquiry, ethnic relations is discussed either by the experiences of individual racial-ethnic groups or else by overarching theoretical issues.

Marx described society as having nine "great" classes, the capitalist class and the working class, with the middle classes falling in behind one or the other as they see fit. He hoped for the working class to rise up against the capitalist class in an attempt to stop the exploitation of the working class. He blamed part of their failure to organize on the capitalist class, as they separated black and white laborers. This separation, specifically between Blacks and Whites in America, contributed to racism. Marx attributes capitalism's contribution to racism through segmented labor markets and a racial inequality of earnings.[1]

Weber laid the foundations for a micro-sociology of ethnic relations beginning in 1906. Weber argued that biological traits could not be the basis for group foundation unless they were conceived as shared characteristics. It was this shared perception and common customs that create and distinguish one ethnicity from another. This differs from the views of many of his contemporaries who believed that an ethnic group was formed from biological similarities alone apart from social perception of membership in a group.[2]

W.E.B. Du Bois is well known as one of the most influential black scholars and activists of the 20th century. Du Bois educated himself on his people, and sought academia as a way to enlighten others on the social injustices against his people. Du Bois research "revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence".[3] Du Bois believed that Black Americans should embrace higher education and use their new access to schooling to achieve a higher position within society. He referred to this idea as the Talented Tenth. With gaining popularity, he also preached the belief that for blacks to be free in some places, they must be free everywhere. After traveling to Africa and Russia, he recanted his original philosophy of integration and acknowledged it as a long term vision.[4]

Booker T. Washington was considered one of the most influential black educators of the 19th and 20th centuries. Born in 1856 as a slave in Virginia, Washington came of age as slavery was coming to an end. Just as slavery ended, however, it was replaced by a system of sharecropping in the South that resulted in black indebtedness. With growing discrimination in the South following the end of the Reconstruction era, Washington felt that the key to advancing in America rested with getting an education and improving one's economic well-being, not with political advancement. Consequently, in 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, in order to provide individuals with an education that would help them to find employment in the growing industrial sector. By focusing on education for blacks, rather than political advancement, he gained financial support from whites for his cause. Secretly, however, he pursued legal challenges against segregation and disfranchisement of blacks.[5]

One of the most important social psychological findings concerning race relations is that members of stereotyped groups internalize those stereotypes and thus suffer a wide range of harmful consequences. For example, in a phenomenon called stereotype threat, members of racial and ethnic groups that are stereotyped as scoring poorly on tests will perform poorer on those tests if they are reminded of this stereotype.[6] The effect is so strong that even simply asking the test-taker to state her or his race before taking the test (such is by bubbling in "African American" on a multiple choice question) will significantly alter test performance.[7] A specifically sociological contribution to this line of research has found that such negative stereotypes can be created on the spot: an experiment by Michael Lovaglia et al.(1998) demonstrated that left-handed people can be made to suffer stereotype threat if they are led to believe that they are a disadvantaged group for a particular kind of test.[8]

Psychoanalysis has much to offer the study of racism.[9] Its central proposition is that rationality is not the natural state of the individual, and that individuals develop defence mechanisms to cope with anxiety. Humans resist change because change threatens established ways of dealing with anxiety.[10] Individual defence mechanisms contribute to social defence mechanisms. The most regressive defence mechanism (the 'paranoid-schizoid' position) results in a complete dehumanising of the 'all-bad' group.[11] The 'all-bad' group is admired as well as feared (often evident in the conspiracy theory). Paradoxically, the arbitrariness of the category 'race' enables the psychotic subject to invest more meaning in it.[12]

Modernity's attempt at rationalisation papers over a polycentric psyche (i.e. all of us still have anxieties and desires, despite our apparent rationality). Racism is a response to the abstracting logic of modernity. The rationality of western, 'white' society is defined in opposition to the 'animality' of black, 'primitive' society.[13]

Some psychoanalytic theorists also argue that passionate anti-racism can produce psychological states analogous to racism.[9]

Another important line of research on race takes the form of audit studies. The audit study approach creates an artificial pool of people among whom there are no average differences by race. For instance, groups of white and black auditors are matched on every category other than their race, and thoroughly trained to act in identical ways. Given nearly identical resumes, they are sent to interview for the same jobs. Simple comparisons of means can yield strong evidence regarding discrimination. The best known audit study in sociology is The Mark of a Criminal Record by Harvard University sociologist Devah Pager. This study compares job prospects of black and white men who were recently released from jail. Its key finding is that blacks are significantly discriminated against when applying for service jobs. Moreover, whites with a criminal record have about the same prospect of getting an interview as blacks without one.[14] Another recent audit by UCLA sociologist S. Michael Gaddis examines the job prospects of black and white college graduates from elite private and high quality state higher education institutions. This research finds that blacks who graduate from an elite school such as Harvard have about the same prospect of getting an interview as whites who graduate from a state school such as UMass Amherst.[15]

In the United States, the study of racial and ethnic relations has been widely influenced by the factors associated with each major wave of immigration as the incoming group struggles with keeping its own cultural and ethnic identity while also assimilating into the broader mainstream American culture and economy. One of the first and most prevalent topics within American study is that of the relations between white Americans and African Americans due to the heavy collective memory and culture borne out of and lingering from centuries of forced slavery in plantations. Throughout the rest of American history, each new wave of immigration to the United States has brought another set of issues as the tension between maintaining diversity and assimilating takes on new shapes. Racism and conflict often rears up during these times.[16] However, some key currents can be gleaned from this body of knowledge: in the context of the United States, there is a tendency for minorities to be punished in times of economic, political and/or geopolitical crises. Times of social and systemic stability, however, tend to mute whatever underlying tensions exist between different groups. In times of societal crisis—whether perceived or real—patterns or retractability of American identities have erupted to the fore of America's political landscape.[17] Notable and infamous examples can be seen in Executive Order 9066 that placed Japanese Americans in incarceration centers as well as the 19th century Chinese Exclusion Act that banned Chinese laborers from emigrating to the United States (local workers viewed Chinese laborers as a threat). Current examples include post-9/11 backlash against Muslim Americans, although these have taken place in civil society, not through public policy.

1.
Sociology
–
Sociology is the study of social behaviour or society, including its origins, development, organisation, networks, and institutions. It is a science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order, disorder. Many sociologists aim to research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare. Subject matter ranges from the level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems. The traditional focuses of sociology include social stratification, social class, social mobility, religion, secularization, law, sexuality, the range of social scientific methods has also expanded. Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques, the linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-twentieth century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophic approaches towards the analysis of society. There is often a great deal of crossover between social research, market research, and other statistical fields, Sociology is distinguished from various general social studies courses, which bear little relation to sociological theory or to social-science research-methodology. The US National Science Foundation classifies sociology as a STEM field, Sociological reasoning pre-dates the foundation of the discipline. Social analysis has origins in the stock of Western knowledge and philosophy. The origin of the survey, i. e, there is evidence of early sociology in medieval Arab writings. The word sociology is derived from both Latin and Greek origins, the Latin word, socius, companion, the suffix -logy, the study of from Greek -λογία from λόγος, lógos, word, knowledge. It was first coined in 1780 by the French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in an unpublished manuscript, Sociology was later defined independently by the French philosopher of science, Auguste Comte, in 1838. Comte used this term to describe a new way of looking at society, Comte had earlier used the term social physics, but that had subsequently been appropriated by others, most notably the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet. Comte endeavoured to unify history, psychology and economics through the understanding of the social realm. Comte believed a positivist stage would mark the final era, after conjectural theological and metaphysical phases, Comte gave a powerful impetus to the development of sociology, an impetus which bore fruit in the later decades of the nineteenth century. To say this is not to claim that French sociologists such as Durkheim were devoted disciples of the high priest of positivism. To be sure, beginnings can be traced back well beyond Montesquieu, for example, Marx rejected Comtean positivism but in attempting to develop a science of society nevertheless came to be recognized as a founder of sociology as the word gained wider meaning. For Isaiah Berlin, Marx may be regarded as the father of modern sociology

2.
History of sociology
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Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged primarily out of enlightenment thought, shortly after the French Revolution, as a positivist science of society. Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science, Social analysis in a broader sense, however, has origins in the common stock of philosophy and necessarily pre-dates the field. Modern academic sociology arose as a reaction to modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, colonization, an emphasis on the concept of modernity, rather than the Enlightenment, often distinguishes sociological discourse from that of classical political philosophy. Various quantitative social research techniques have become common tools for governments, businesses and organizations, divorced from theoretical explanations of social dynamics, this has given social research a degree of autonomy from the discipline of sociology. Similarly, social science has come to be appropriated as a term to refer to various disciplines which study humans, interaction. Sociological reasoning may be traced back at least as far as the ancient Greeks, proto-sociological observations are to be found in the founding texts of Western philosophy, as well as in the non-European thought of figures such as Confucius. The characteristic trends in the thinking of the ancient Greeks can be traced back to their social environment. Because there was rarely any extensive or highly centralized political organization within states this allowed the tribal spirit of localism and provincialism to have free play and this tribal spirit of localism and provincialism pervaded most of the Greek thinking upon social phenomena. The origin of the survey can be traced back to the Domesday Book ordered by king William I in 1086, there is evidence of early Muslim sociology from the 14th century. He is thus considered by some to be the forerunner of sociology, concerning the discipline of sociology, he conceived a dynamic theory of history that involved conceptualizations of social conflict and social change. He developed the dichotomy of sedentary life versus nomadic life as well as the concept of a generation, following a contemporary Arab scholar, Sati al-Husri, the Muqaddimah may be read as a sociological work, six books of general sociology. Topics dealt with in this work include politics, urban life, economics, the work is based around Ibn Khalduns central concept of asabiyyah, which has been translated as social cohesion, group solidarity, or tribalism. This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other kinship groups. The term was first coined by the French essayist Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, from the Latin, socius, companion, and the suffix -ology, in 1838, the French-thinker Auguste Comte ultimately gave sociology the definition that it holds today. Comte had earlier expressed his work as physics, but that term had been appropriated by others, most notably a Belgian statistician. He argued that scientists could distract groups from war and strife, in turn, this would bring multiple cultures and societies together and prevent conflict. Saint-Simon took the idea that everyone had encouraged from the Enlightenment, which was the belief in science, saint-Simons main idea was that industrialism would create a new launch in history. He saw that people had been seeing progress as an approach for science, Society was making a crucial change at the time since it was growing out of a declining feudalism

3.
Ethnography
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Ethnography is the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study, an ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group. The word can thus be said to have a double meaning, the resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group. The typical ethnography is a study and so includes a brief history, and an analysis of the terrain, the climate. In all cases it should be reflexive, make a contribution toward the understanding of the social life of humans, have an aesthetic impact on the reader. An ethnography records all observed behavior and describes all symbol-meaning relations, the word ethnography is derived from the Greek ἔθνος, meaning a company, later a people, nation and -graphy meaning field of study. Ethnographic studies focus on large groups of people who interact over time. Ethnography is a design, where the researcher explains about shared learnt patterns of values, behaviour, beliefs. The field of anthropology originated from Europe and England designed in late 19th century and it spread its roots to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the main contributors like EB Tylor from Britain and Lewis H Morgan, franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, were a group of researchers from United States who contributed the idea of cultural relativism to the literature. He gives the point of the native and this became the origin of field work. Since Malinowski was very firm with his approach he applied it practically and he was interested in learning the language of the islanders and stayed there for a long time doing his field work. The field of ethnography became very popular in the late 19th century, again, in the latter part of the 19th century, the field of anthropology became a good support for scientific formation. Though the field was flourishing it had a lot of threat to encounter, post colonialism, the research climate shifted towards post-modernism and feminism. Therefore, the field of anthropology moved into discipline of social science, gerhard Friedrich Müller developed the concept of ethnography as a separate discipline whilst participating in the Second Kamchatka Expedition as a professor of history and geography. Whilst involved in the expedition, he differentiated Völker-Beschreibung as an area of study. This became known as ethnography, following the introduction of the Greek neologism ethnographia by Johann Friedrich Schöpperlin, there are different forms of ethnography, confessional ethnography, life history, feminist ethnography etc. Two popular forms of ethnography are realist ethnography and critical ethnography, realist ethnography, is a traditional approach used by cultural anthropologists

4.
Sociology of health and illness
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The sociology of health and illness, alternatively the sociology of health and wellness, examines the interaction between society and health. The objective of this topic is to see how social life affects morbidity and mortality rate and this aspect of sociology differs from medical sociology in that this branch of sociology discusses health and illness in relation to social institutions such as family, employment, and school. The sociology of medicine limits its concern to the patient-practitioner relationship, the sociology of health and illness covers sociological pathology, reasons for seeking particular types of medical aid, and patient compliance or noncompliance with medical regimes. Health, or lack of health, was once attributed to biological or natural conditions. Sociologists have demonstrated that the spread of diseases is influenced by the socioeconomic status of individuals, ethnic traditions or beliefs. This topic requires an approach of analysis because the influence of societal factors varies throughout the world. This will be demonstrated through discussion of the diseases of each continent. These diseases are sociologically examined and compared based on the medicine, economics, religion. HIV/AIDS serves as a basis of comparison among regions. While it is problematic in certain areas, in others it has affected a relatively small percentage of the population. Sociological factors can help to explain why these discrepancies exist, there are obvious differences in patterns of health and illness across societies, over time, and within particular society types. Patterns of global change in health care systems make it more imperative than ever to research and comprehend the sociology of health, continuous changes in economy, therapy, technology and insurance can affect the way individual communities view and respond to the medical care available. These rapid fluctuations cause the issue of health and illness within social life to be dynamic in definition. Advancing information is vital because as patterns evolve, the study of the sociology of health, humans have long sought advice from those with knowledge or skill in healing. Paleopathology and other records, allow an examination of how ancient societies dealt with illness. Rulers in Ancient Egypt sponsored physicians that were specialists in specific diseases, imhotep was the first medical doctor known by name. An Egyptian who lived around 2650 B. C. he was an adviser to King Zoser at a time when Egyptians were making progress in medicine, among his contributions to medicine was a textbook on the treatment of wounds, broken bones, and even tumors. Stopping the spread of disease was of utmost importance for maintaining a healthy society

5.
Social movement
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Social movements are a type of group action. They are large, sometimes informal, groupings of individuals or organizations which focus on political or social issues. In other words, they carry out, resist, or undo a social change, modern Western social movements became possible through education and increased mobility of labor due to the industrialization and urbanization of 19th century societies. However, others point out many of the social movements of the last hundred years grew up, like the Mau Mau in Kenya. Either way, social movements have been and continued to be connected with democratic political systems. Occasionally, social movements have been involved in democratizing nations, over the past 200 years, they have become part of a popular and global expression of dissent. Modern movements often utilize technology and the internet to people globally. Adapting to communication trends is a theme among successful movements. Research is beginning to explore how advocacy organizations linked to social movements in the U. S. and Canada use social media to facilitate civic engagement, the systematic literature review of Buettner & Buettner analyzed the role of Twitter during a wide range of social movements. Political science and sociology have developed a variety of theories and empirical research on social movements, there is no single consensus definition of a social movement. For Tilly, social movements are a vehicle for ordinary peoples participation in public politics. Sidney Tarrow defines a social movement as collective challenges by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interactions with elites, opponents and he specifically distinguishes social movements from political parties and advocacy groups. The first mass social movement catalyzed around the political figure. Charged with seditious libel, Wilkes was arrested after the issue of a general warrant, as a result of this episode, Wilkes became a figurehead to the growing movement for popular sovereignty among the middle classes - people began chanting, Wilkes and Liberty in the streets. After a later period of exile, brought about by further charges of libel and obscenity, Wilkes stood for the Parliamentary seat at Middlesex, where most of his support was located. When Wilkes was imprisoned in the Kings Bench Prison on 10 May 1768 and this was the first ever sustained social movement, -it involved public meetings, demonstrations, the distribution of pamphlets on an unprecedented scale and the mass petition march. The force and influence of social movement on the streets of London compelled the authorities to concede to the movements demands. Wilkes was returned to Parliament, general warrants were declared as unconstitutional, the Association had the support of leading Calvinist religious figures, including Rowland Hill, Erasmus Middleton, and John Rippon

6.
Criminology
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Criminology is the scientific study of the nature, extent, management, causes, control, consequences, and prevention of criminal behavior, both on the individual and social levels. The term criminology was coined in 1885 by Italian law professor Raffaele Garofalo as criminologia, later, French anthropologist Paul Topinard used the analogous French term criminologie. In the mid-18th century criminology arose as social philosophers gave thought to crime, over time, several schools of thought have developed. There were three schools of thought in early criminological theory spanning the period from the mid-18th century to the mid-twentieth century, Classical, Positive. The Classical School, which developed in the century, was based on utilitarian philosophy. Cesare Beccaria, author of On Crimes and Punishments, Jeremy Bentham, thus, it ignores the possibility of irrationality and unconscious drives as motivators. Punishment can deter people from crime, as the costs outweigh benefits, the more swift and certain the punishment, the more effective it is in deterring criminal behavior. The Classical school of thought came about at a time when major reform in penology occurred, also, this time period saw many legal reforms, the French Revolution, and the development of the legal system in the United States. The Positivist school presumes that criminal behavior is caused by internal and external factors outside of the individuals control, the scientific method was introduced and applied to study human behavior. Positivism can be broken up into three segments which include biological, psychological and social positivism, Cesare Lombroso, an Italian sociologist working in the late 19th century, is regarded as the father of criminology. He was one of the key contributors to biological positivism and founded the Italian school of criminology, Lombroso took a scientific approach, insisting on empirical evidence for studying crime. This approach, influenced by the theory of phrenology and by Charles Darwin. Criminologists have since rejected Lombrosos biological theories, with groups not used in his studies. Sociological positivism suggests that factors such as poverty, membership of subcultures. Adolphe Quetelet made use of data and statistical analysis to gain insight into the relationship between crime and sociological factors and he found that age, gender, poverty, education, and alcohol consumption were important factors related to crime. Lance Lochner conducted three different research experiments that shared the same conclusion, schooling reduces crime by a significant margin, Rawson W. Rawson utilized crime statistics to suggest a link between population density and crime rates, with crowded cities creating an environment conducive for crime. Joseph Fletcher and John Glyde also presented papers to the Statistical Society of London on their studies of crime, Henry Mayhew used empirical methods and an ethnographic approach to address social questions and poverty, and presented his studies in London Labour and the London Poor. Émile Durkheim viewed crime as an aspect of society, with uneven distribution of wealth

7.
Sociology of law
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The sociology of law is often described as a sub-discipline of sociology or an interdisciplinary approach within legal studies. Some see sociology of law as belonging necessarily to the field of sociology whilst others tend to consider it a field of research caught up between the disciplines of law and sociology. Still others regard it neither as a sub-discipline of sociology nor as a branch of legal studies and its object encompasses the historical movement of law and justice and their relentless contemporary construction, e. g. The roots of the sociology of law can be traced back to the works of sociologists and jurists of the turn of the previous century, the relationship between law and society was sociologically explored in the seminal works of both Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. The writings on law by these classical sociologists are foundational to the sociology of law today. A number of scholars, mainly jurists, also employed social scientific theories. Notably among these were Leon Petrazycki, Eugen Ehrlich and Georges Gurvitch, for Max Weber, a so-called legal rational form as a type of domination within society, is not attributable to people but to abstract norms. He understood the body of coherent and calculable law in terms of a rational-legal authority, such coherent and calculable law formed a precondition for modern political developments and the modern bureaucratic state and developed in parallel with the growth of capitalism. Central to the development of law is the formal rationalisation of law on the basis of general procedures that are applied equally and fairly to all. Modern rationalised law is codified and impersonal in its application to specific cases. Over time, law has undergone a transformation from repressive law to restitutive law, restitutive law operates in societies in which there is a high degree of individual variation and emphasis on personal rights and responsibilities. For Durkheim, law is an indicator of the mode of integration of a society, Durkheim also argued that a sociology of law should be developed alongside, and in close connection with, a sociology of morals, studying the development of value systems reflected in law. In Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law, Eugen Ehrlich developed an approach to the study of law by focusing on how social networks. The latter emerged spontaneously as people interacted with other to form social associations. According to Kelsen, Ehrlich had confused Sein and Sollen, Petrazyckis work addressed sociological problems and his method was empirical, since he maintained that one could gain knowledge of objects or relationships only by observation. However, he couched his theory in the language of cognitive psychology, consequently, his contribution to the development of sociology of law remains largely unrecognized. Among those who were inspired by Petrazyckis work is the Polish legal sociologist Adam Podgórecki. Theodor Geiger developed an analysis of the Marxist theory of law

8.
Bibliography of sociology
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This bibliography of sociology is a list of works, organized by subdiscipline, on the subject of sociology. Including Theses on Feuerbach and introduction to The critique of political economy, die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Translated by Peter Baehr, Gordon C, puts forward a thesis that Puritan ethic and ideas had influenced the development of capitalism. However religious devotion usually was accompanied by rejection of mundane affairs including economic pursuit, why was that not the case with Protestantism. Weber addresses that paradox in that work, de La Division Du Travail Social. A case study of suicide rates amongst Catholic, Protestant and Jewish populations, also a major contribution to structural functionalism. Cladis, Mark S. ed. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique. Halls with an introduction by Steven Lukes, demography is the statistical study of human population. It encompasses the study of the size, structure and distribution of these populations, Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population with A Summary View, and Introduction by Professor Antony Flew. Crisis in the Population Question Economic sociology attempts to explain economic phenomena and it overlaps with economics but concentrates on the roles of social relations and institutions. The Old Regime and the French Revolution, de La Division Du Travail Social. The Great Transformation, the political and economic origins of our time, rival Interpretations of Market Society, Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble. Economic Action and Social Structure, The Problem of Embeddedness, markets from Networks, Socioeconomic Models of Production. Princeton, Princeton University Press Smelser, Neil and Richard Swedberg, industrial sociology is the sociology of technological change, globalization, labor markets, work organization, managerial practices and employment relations. Environmental sociology, a social constructionist perspective, environment and society, the enduring conflict. Demonstrates how our global economy requires increasing levels of economic expansion, dunlap, Riley E. ed. Handbook of environmental sociology. Provides an overview of the field of sociology and its various research emphases. Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, lenses of Gender, Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality

9.
Social network analysis
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Social network analysis is the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks and graph theory. It characterizes networked structures in terms of nodes and the ties, edges and these networks are often visualized through sociograms in which nodes are represented as points and ties are represented as lines. Social network analysis has emerged as a key technique in modern sociology, in the 1930s Jacob Moreno and Helen Jennings introduced basic analytical methods. Even in the study of literature, network analysis has been applied by Anheier, Gerhards and Romo, Wouter De Nooy, indeed, social network analysis has found applications in various academic disciplines, as well as practical applications such as countering money laundering and terrorism. Homophily, The extent to which actors form ties with similar versus dissimilar others, similarity can be defined by gender, race, age, occupation, educational achievement, status, values or any other salient characteristic. Homophily is also referred to as assortativity, multiplexity, The number of content-forms contained in a tie. For example, two people who are friends and also work together would have a multiplexity of 2, multiplexity has been associated with relationship strength. Mutuality/Reciprocity, The extent to which two actors reciprocate each others friendship or other interaction, Network Closure, A measure of the completeness of relational triads. An individuals assumption of network closure is called transitivity, transitivity is an outcome of the individual or situational trait of Need for Cognitive Closure. Propinquity, The tendency for actors to have ties with geographically close others. Bridge, An individual whose weak ties fill a structural hole and it also includes the shortest route when a longer one is unfeasible due to a high risk of message distortion or delivery failure. Centrality, Centrality refers to a group of metrics that aim to quantify the importance or influence of a node within a network. Examples of common methods of measuring centrality include betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, eigenvector centrality, alpha centrality, density, The proportion of direct ties in a network relative to the total number possible. Distance, The minimum number of required to connect two particular actors, as popularized by Stanley Milgrams small world experiment and the idea of six degrees of separation. Structural holes, The absence of ties between two parts of a network, finding and exploiting a structural hole can give an entrepreneur a competitive advantage. This concept was developed by sociologist Ronald Burt, and is referred to as an alternate conception of social capital. Tie Strength, Defined by the combination of time, emotional intensity, intimacy. Strong ties are associated with homophily, propinquity and transitivity, while ties are associated with bridges

10.
Positivism
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Positivism is a philosophical theory stating that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations. Thus, information derived from experience, interpreted through reason and logic. Positivism holds that knowledge is found only in this derived knowledge. Verified data received from the senses are known as empirical evidence, Positivism also holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to general laws. Introspective and intuitive knowledge is rejected, as are metaphysics and theology, Comte argued that, much as the physical world operates according to gravity and other absolute laws, so does society, and further developed positivism into a Religion of Humanity. The English noun positivism was re-imported in the 19th century from the French word positivisme, the corresponding adjective has been used in similar sense to discuss law since the time of Chaucer. Wilhelm Dilthey popularized the distinction between Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaften, the consideration that laws in physics may not be absolute but relative, and, if so, this might be more true of social sciences, was stated, in different terms, by G. B. Vico, in contrast to the positivist movement, asserted the superiority of the science of the human mind, Positivism asserts that all authentic knowledge allows verification and that all authentic knowledge assumes that the only valid knowledge is scientific. Émile Durkheim reformulated sociological positivism as a foundation of social research, Wilhelm Dilthey, in contrast, fought strenuously against the assumption that only explanations derived from science are valid. Dilthey was in part influenced by the historicism of Leopold von Ranke, at the turn of the 20th century the first wave of German sociologists, including Max Weber and Georg Simmel, rejected the doctrine, thus founding the antipositivist tradition in sociology. Later antipositivists and critical theorists have associated positivism with scientism, science as ideology, but can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing. If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting, Logical positivists rejected metaphysical speculation and attempted to reduce statements and propositions to pure logic. Strong critiques of this approach by philosophers such as Karl Popper, Willard Van Orman Quine and Thomas Kuhn have been highly influential, in historiography the debate on positivism has been characterized by the quarrel between positivism and historicism. Arguments against positivist approaches in historiography include that history differs from sciences like physics and ethology in subject matter and that much of what history studies is nonquantifiable, and therefore to quantify is to lose in precision. Experimental methods and mathematical models do not generally apply to history, Positivism in the social sciences is usually characterized by quantitative approaches and the proposition of quasi-absolute laws. A significant exception to this trend is represented by cultural anthropology, in psychology the positivist movement was influential in the development of operationalism. Economic thinker Friedrich Hayek rejected positivism in the sciences as hopelessly limited in comparison to evolved and divided knowledge. For example, much legislation falls short in contrast to pre-literate or incompletely defined common or evolved law, in contemporary social science, strong accounts of positivism have long since fallen out of favour

11.
Structural functionalism
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Structural functionalism, or simply functionalism, is a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. This approach looks at society through an orientation, which is a broad focus on the social structures that shape society as a whole. This approach looks at both social structure and social functions, Functionalism addresses society as a whole in terms of the function of its constituent elements, namely norms, customs, traditions, and institutions. A common analogy, popularized by Herbert Spencer, presents these parts of society as organs that work toward the proper functioning of the body as a whole. For Talcott Parsons, structural-functionalism came to describe a stage in the methodological development of social science. Biology has been taken to provide a guide to conceptualizing the structure, Functionalism strongly emphasises the pre-eminence of the social world over its individual parts. Functionalism also has a basis in the work of theorists such as Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski. It is in Radcliffe-Browns specific usage that the prefix structural emerged, Radcliffe-Brown proposed that most stateless, primitive societies, lacking strong centralized institutions, are based on an association of corporate-descent groups. Structural functionalism also took on Malinowskis argument that the building block of society is the nuclear family. Émile Durkheim was concerned with the question of how certain societies maintain internal stability and he proposed that such societies tend to be segmented, with equivalent parts held together by shared values, common symbols or, as his nephew Marcel Mauss held, systems of exchanges. Durkheim used the mechanical solidarity to refer to these types of social bonds, based on common sentiments & shared moral values. In modern, complex societies, members perform very different tasks and these views were upheld by Durkheim, who, following Comte, believed that society constitutes a separate level of reality, distinct from both biological and inorganic matter. Explanations of social phenomena had therefore to be constructed within this level, the central concern of structural functionalism is a continuation of the Durkheimian task of explaining the apparent stability and internal cohesion needed by societies to endure over time. All social and cultural phenomena are seen as functional in the sense of working together. They are primarily analyzed in terms of this function, the individual is significant not in and of himself, but rather in terms of his status, his position in patterns of social relations, and the behaviours associated with his status. Therefore, the structure is the network of statuses connected by associated roles. It is simplistic to equate the perspective directly with political conservatism, the tendency to emphasize cohesive systems, however, leads functionalist theories to be contrasted with conflict theories which instead emphasize social problems and inequalities. Auguste Comte, the Father of Positivism, pointed out the need to keep society unified as many traditions were diminishing and he was the first person to coin the term sociology